


Nae Authority!

by EllynNeverSweet



Category: Discworld - Terry Pratchett, His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
Genre: Gen, One Shot, daemons AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-07
Updated: 2020-01-07
Packaged: 2021-02-27 14:54:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,284
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22158916
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/EllynNeverSweet/pseuds/EllynNeverSweet
Summary: A relatively quiet day on the Chalk turns into chaos as the Feegles encounter an armoured bear. Tiffany attempts to inject some sense into the situation.
Comments: 12
Kudos: 29





	Nae Authority!

It had been a quiet day. In hindsight, that should have been her first warning.

It wasn’t that she’d hadn’t anything to do — Tiffany had gone round the houses to check on old people and new babies, changed bandages and nappies, and dispensed simples, which was easy, and talk, which wasn’t, and that had taken up most of the morning. Then she’d gone home and made up more simples to replace what she’d given out, which was a complicated business because she was good at it, and then, because she had some spare time and she’d wanted to, she’d made cheese. No one had died. No one had even vomited on her, which was nice. No mysterious rustling had followed her home. That should have been the worrying thing. The Feegles could be silent for days, weeks even, but the nice thing about having Frank for a dæmon was that she always knew where they were when they were following her, which was all the time. Not today, though.

So it was a disappointment, but not exactly a surprise, when a rainbow had opened up in the sky and something very large and — this was by no means the _only_ important part — _on fire_ had spat out of the clear rainbow-y sky and slammed onto the pasture somewhere up above the Achings’ farm. Tiffany, who _had_ been enjoying a cup of tea and a cheese sandwich, had been perfectly placed to witness the whole thing from where she was sitting on the back steps.

She had sighed, and gone to get her broom. Frank, who didn’t like flying, had grumbled about getting into the sling underneath, because he inevitably ended up bumping into shrubbery while Tiffany tried in vain to work up enough height. Strictly speaking, he should have sat on the bristles, but since he’d ended up as a sheepdog, rather than the usual cat shape that witches’ dæmons tended to take, he lacked something in the claw department for hanging on during high or even moderate winds.

It didn’t take long to find roughly what she was looking for. Whatever it was had gouged straight into the turf, black and singed on either side and glowing fresh white in the late afternoon sun where the chalk had been exposed. It took her a minute longer to find the cause of all this destruction, in the first place because it wasn’t on fire anymore, and in the second place because it was pale enough to blend in to the powdery cloud of dust it had raked up in its passage, though common sense told her it couldn’t have gone any further than the lump of churned mess at the end of the line. Frank jumped neatly out when he was about four feet off the ground, and Tiffany landed rather less gracefully, grabbing the now-empty sling to tow her broom along.

Tiffany frowned, and looked at the _thing_ through two sets of eyes. There was nothing, strictly speaking, magical about this, although it was witchy. Everyone has two sets of eyes.[1] To be more precise, pretty nearly every sapient, vaguely-humanoid creature has their own two eyes, and then another two in their dæmon,[2] and, with a bit of effort, most people can manage to see through their dæmon’s eyes if they really want to. Tiffany and her dæmon circled the thing once, and came to the firm conclusion that they had absolutely no idea what it might be.

She circled it again. It looked like a huge, dirty sheep fleece, the sort that came from sheep who escaped the fold and went to live lives of bold freedom like their ancestors in the flint caves dotted about the downs, until their fleece grew over their eyes, they fell into the stream, and Tiffany had to spend a cold soggy evening dragging them up the bank and back to the shearing shed to be dosed with turpentine. Under the powdered chalk that had settled on it she could make out that it had sheets of rusty metal on it, which knocked a little metaphorical charcoal off the anger that smouldered perpetually inside Tiffany’s head. _Metal, on the Chalk_.

It smelled like a butcher’s shop at the end of a long day in late summer, before the floor had been swilled out and the knives had been cleaned off, and it sounded like Nanny Ogg and her dæmon Greebo snoring after a party, if Nanny had felt wicked enough to fall asleep next to a loudhailer with a party pipe in her mouth.

All that made her think that it might, probably, on balance, be alive, despite having dropped out of the sky. And if it was alive, it was alarmingly big. It seemed to have no dæmon. One one hand, that made it less complicated, which could be a good thing. Animals didn’t have dæmons, although a general rule of thumb was that nearly everything sapient enough to call a person did.[3] On the other hand, ‘less complicated’ meant four-fifths of nothing with regards to whether or not something was going to be a problem. Animals didn’t have to be sapient to be dangerous. They also didn’t have to be sapient to be Tiffany’s responsibility, and here, on the Chalk, everything was her responsibility.

The thing moved, a weird, flopping motion as if something was shifting underneath it. Frank froze in a herding crouch, teeth bared. It didn’t happen again, so Tiffany risked a few cautious steps back and around. She could see now that there was at one end an enormous head as big as her whole torso. A black button nose snuffled on its tip, a bit of straw stuck in one enormous nostril and fluttering wildly. The thing all that suggested was _bear_ , but she didn’t think bears came in white, or wore helmets for that matter, and she held on to that thought as her stomach made a determined attempt to escape through the soles of her boots. She’d seen bears in the Ramtops — Greebo had once treed a bear and sworn at it for four hours for interrupting Nanny at an inopportune moment in the woods when Nanny had been, in a manner of speaking, understudying the bear’s role in rhetorical philosophy — but those would look like kittens next to this thing.

‘’Scuse me, Miss,’ said the exception to the rule of thumb from behind Tiffany, who didn’t jump. ‘If we could ask ye to step just a _wee_ bitty back fra’ this big piece o’ work, please.’

She looked down, and found that she had grown several inches, and was moving smoothly backwards over the grass. Frank, who was being carried in the same fashion, refrained from chewing on the closest member of the Nac Mac Feegle with great forbearance. They had had several discussions about this over the years. The Feegles maintained they didn’t have dæmons, because they were dead, and the rules therefore did not apply to them. Tiffany didn’t argue with this out loud,[4] but she had never been able to understand how that could work. One particularly boring day on a visit to Ankh-Morpork she’d attended a public lecture at Unseen University where one of the wizards had talked about the theory of multiple worlds. He’d postulated the idea that in some worlds people’s dæmons might live inside them, rather than taking separate identifiable form, which seemed horribly inconvenient. Of course, he’d also talked a lot of nonsense about slude theory, but that was wizards for you. In any case, Frank had reasoned, if Feegles kept their dæmons inside them then he would naturally have to nip the Feegle to nip the dæmon, and if they didn’t have dæmons, Frank would just have to bite them anyway until they made sense. The Feegles inevitably took no harm from this, since Frank had too much sense to actually swallow one, although they did tend to complain that it didnae half tickle.

Once Tiffany had been deposited at what the Feegles considered to be a safe distance, she got down and looked at them grimly.

‘What,’ she said, ‘ _happened_?’

Silence. Tiffany crossed her arms. Frank growled.

In the crowd of gathered Feegles, hands began to wring.

She tapped her foot.

‘Twas not our fault!’ wailed Daft Wullie on cue. ‘We meant to vanquish the turrrrrible big beastie and send him runnin’ afore you got here, only as ye see he’s wrapped hisself all cosy in yon iron armour, and you knows how we feels about iron, so we couldnae get a proper hold o’ him anywhere near the vittles, ye see. Wee Dangerous Spike had to run up ’is nostril and crack ’is heid for him fra’ the inside.’

‘Twas more like slidin’ up, really,’ said Wee Dangerous Spike. ‘Although it got a bit hairy when he started t’ breathe again, since I didnae want to miss me destination. I wouldhae bin _hours_ cutting me way out fra’ the lungs, and my breathing straw wouldnae stretch to it in any case. What I’d like to know is, where was _you_ lads when ye were meant to be keeping ’im breathin’ though ’is geggy? All you had to do was wave a ship in front of — ’ he broke off with a guilty look at Tiffany. She turned a blind eye to the occasional theft of a sheep to feed the Feegle mound, because eating only rabbit was bad for a body, but using one as a weapon in a bear fight was probably not in the same spirit.

That explained the straw, at least.

‘An’,’ said Daft Wullie, warming to the subject.

He was cut off by Tiffany’s rapidly tapping foot. ‘I mean,’ she said tightly, ‘why is it _here?_ Great big bears in armour are not a species native to the Chalk. I suspect they’d be thought a bit weird in Überwald, honestly. And just look at the state of the turf, would you? It looks like someone has taken a plough to it!’

The Feegles looked suspiciously guilty.

‘What I want to know,’ said Tiffany, ‘and I suspect I already know the answer but you’ll oblige me anyway, is this — _did you bring it here?’_

‘Not _technic’ly_ ,’ mumbled Daft Wullie.

Tiffany breathed through her nose, and counted backwards from ten. This, she had found, mostly made her angrier, but it was at least a controlled sort of anger. A forging sort of anger.

She considered the group in front of her, and realised that she had somehow overlooked a noteworthy absence.

‘Where’s Rob Anybody?’

This produced a great deal of complicated pointing, sometimes with both hands and a foot, and indistinct directions shouted over the top of each other that went something like ‘— then take three worlds to the left — ’ ‘— not _left_ , ye numpty, Hubwards-by-Widdershins — ’ ‘— ye cannae have a _Hubwards_ if ye don’t have a _Hub_ , tis _left_ — ’ ‘anyway, then ye go straight on until ye reach the big city full of bogles, stop for a speck of plunder, an’ — ’

‘He’s no’ here,’ said Big Yan, at last. ‘He’s…well, tis complicated, ye ken. He’s in another world, where yon great beastie comes from, we think. It’s a bit of a way away.’

Tiffany had been musing over _not technically_.

‘Alright,’ she said, ‘if you didn’t mean to bring it here, how _did_ it get here? Can you send it back?’ She very much wanted it gone.

There was an embarrassed silence.

‘The thing is,’ said Big Yan, looking thoroughly shamefaced. ‘The thing is, Miss, that — ’ he swallowed, and waved his hands helplessly. ‘It _chased_ us.’

Tiffany, for possibly the first time in her life, found herself actually speechless.

‘Oh,’ she managed, at last.

A single Feegle could handily end a full-scale pub brawl, though they much preferred starting them. A horde of Feegles — even a small horde, as was currently before her — could send armies running. Something that looked at a horde of Feegles and decided to chase them was either very, very stupid, or very, very dangerous.

‘We was comin’ for backup, ye ken,’ said Medium-Sized Jock. ‘We didnae think it would be able to follow us through the crawstep.’

‘And Rob’s gone to find the world it came from? Are there _more_ of them?’

‘Oh aye! Hundreds!’ This was said very cheerfully indeed. ‘That’s why we needed the backup.’

At this point, Tiffany weighed her options and decided it was time to ask the stupid question and hope for an answer. ‘Why were you fighting it in the first place? Aside from, and I know this is the obvious answer, _it was there_ , did you actually have…a reason?’

Wee Dangerous Spike, who had apparently not found the time to wipe the bear-snot from himself before he dried into an approximation of his name, put a hand up, hopping stiffly. ‘They said they was going to destroy heaven! Some big bas— ’ Big Yan poked him furiously in the ribs, and Spike blushed purple, ‘bear up front o’ a mass of ‘em was talkin’ about how they had to tear down heaven, all for the sake of some laird or t’other, and we thought, not on our watch! So we rushed ’em, only we didn’t realise they had all that iron oan, and then this hairy scunner had the nerve to come chasin’ after us, so we thought we better knock him out before he offskied back to the rest of ’em and told ’em how to get here. Anyway, it’ll be nae problem now. We’ll get the rest o’ the lads down from the mound and finish him off easy as anythin’, only we have to wait for him to wak’ up first. Tis only fair.’

There was a round of nodding and _oh, aye_ -s at this.

‘I’m not sure that I can agree with that,’ said Tiffany. ‘I mean…I don’t want it here, obviously. But you say they can talk, which means they can probably think, which means that we… _I_ … might be able to reason with it. I don’t suppose the Gonnagle stayed behind, did he?’

‘I’m right here, Miss,’ said Awf’lly Wee Billy Bigchin, from behind her left ankle, where he was puffing slightly and re-arranging his mousepipes. A crowd of Feegles had arrived with him, looking positively clean in comparison to the soot-and-snot stained Feegles who had arrived with the bear. Wee Honeymouth Jock, whom Billy Bigchin had recently taken as a gonnagle-in-training, was panting and dirty, and had presumably been sent as a runner from the returned party to the mound.

Tiffany felt a twinge of relief at the arrival of what constituted good sense in a Feegle.

‘Right,’ she said. ‘So, I think the thing we need to do is wake the bear up, and ask him to explain himself. But _first_ , we need to make sure he can’t get loose.’

It didn’t take long. There was plenty of rope around, and the Feegles made short work of trussing the bear up, although every so often one of them would touch the iron armour, swear, and suck his fingers furiously. Tiffany laid down every spell of binding and protection she’d ever heard of, even the ones Anagramma had made up, and then, because she was practical, got the frying pan out of the kitchen and Mr Aching’s crossbow out of the locked safe inside the locked cupboard in her parents’ bedroom.

Then she summoned every scrap of courage, lit a bundle of feathers on fire, and waved it under the bear’s nose until it sneezed, expelling the straw and a lot of other stuff besides, including a scrap of blue tartan.

It opened its eyes and snarled like the avalanche at the end of the world.

Frank snarled back.

‘Excuse me,’ said Tiffany. ‘I’m very sorry about the ropes, but I need to ask you a question. My friends here,’ she waved at the assembled Feegles, ‘are under the impression you’ve come here to destroy their home. Is that true?’

The bear looked around, inasmuch as it could manage, flat on its stomach in a rubbly chalk pit. The whites of its eyes were bloodshot. ‘Is this the kingdom of heaven?’

There was an embarrassed pause. ‘It’s heaven, sure enough,’ said a Feegle voice. ‘But we’ve nae truck with kings here.’

‘There’s the Baron,’ added another voice helpfully. ‘We could go get ’im.’ There was a bit of malice in this. Some of the Feegles had never entirely forgiven Roland for throwing Tiffany over.

The bear looked at Tiffany. ‘Are you Lyra Silvertongue?’

‘Nope,’ said Tiffany at once, forming an instant dislike on the basis of _that_ name. No-one useful was ever called something that flowery. ‘ _I_ am Tiffany Aching. I’m the witch around here.’ That should have been obvious, but maybe bears didn’t recognise hats.

‘If you are a witch, you should let me go free. We are allies in Lord Asriel’s army.’

Tiffany shrugged. ‘I’m not in any army. Not really a witch _thing_ , armies. Not in this world, at least.’

The bear struggled uselessly against its bindings, looking like a caterpillar wiggling into a cocoon. Insofar as its face was able to suggest anything, a sort of bafflement seemed to have settled there. ‘I demand you release me. This is no way to treat an armoured bear. Release me, and I will fight your champion.’

‘The thing is,’ said Tiffany, ‘We’d be quite happy to let you go with no fighting at all,’ there was a chorus of disapproving jeers from the Feegles, ‘so long as you actually leave. But I’m not going to let you leave here so you can go cause trouble somewhere else. That’s not right. Tell me about this army of yours.’

The bear grunted. ‘It is the army of Lord Asriel, who has sworn to end destiny. He has gone to fight the Authority and tear down the kingdom of heaven, so that all worlds may be free of tyranny.’

‘Oh aye,’ said a Feegle. ‘Tyranny. Turrrrrible, that is. But why would there be tyranny in heaven? Ye cannae have tyranny in heaven, else it wouldnae be heaven.’

‘Because,’ said the bear, ‘of the Authority, who rules there.’

There was a lot of whispering, and the Gonnagle, apparently having been applied to, came forward.

‘By Authority,’ he said, addressing the bear with all the dignity conferred by his position, ‘do ye perhaps mean a _king_?’

‘Worse,’ said the bear. ‘We bears have a king, who rules because he is the strongest amongst us and fights all comers. This Authority pretends to have created all the worlds, but he only a usurping old liar, and he hides behinds armies of angels who would make everyone his subject. He calls himself king of kings, but he does not even fight for himself.’

A pool of muttering started at this, little waves of discontent breaking around Tiffany’s ankles.

‘And this kingdom of heaven that ye speak of is where this scuggan lives, d’ye say?’

Tiffany was beginning to feel that the discussion had got away from her.

‘Yes,’ said the bear. ‘And we will tear it down, and in its place we will build a world free of tyranny, a republic of heaven its place, with no Authority, no king,’

’Nae quin,’ added a Feegle voice.

‘What?’ said the bear, and the pool swelled and became an ocean.

‘—Nae laird! Nae master! _We willnae be fooled again!_ ’ Feegle swords were waved everywhere except under Frank.

The bear blinked.

‘Well that settles that, then,’ said Big Yan, applying his bread-knife sized claymore to the knots holding down the bear.

‘It does?’ asked Tiffany.

‘Course it does. We’ve got a republic of heaven here, right enough, and we’ll nae be part of a kingdom, aye lads? We’d best hurry or Rob will hae all the fun tae hisself. I expect he’s already expectin’ us to come and sort things out with this laird.’

A cry of _’Nae Authority!’_ went up. Billy Bigchin blew a triumphant jig on the mousepipes, which made Frank whine. The bear rose to his feet, taller than Tiffany even on all four paws.

He looked her in the eye, breathing carnage. Wee Dangerous Spike landed on his nose, grinning, and he flinched.

Billy Bigchin stowed his pipes, and climbed up the dense yellow fur.  
‘Miss, will ye be so good as to tell Jeannie where we’ve gone? I’d tell her myself, only this will _certainly_ need a song to commemorate it.’

‘Where _are_ you going?’ asked Tiffany.

‘Good question,’ said Daft Wullie, who was hanging on to one flicking ear and cheerfully ignoring the hint. ‘D’ye ken the way, beastie?’

‘Now hold on a minute –‘ said Tiffany.

‘I can find it,’ said the bear, ‘if you will show me the bridge again.’

‘But you don’t even know who this Lord Asriel _is_ ,’ protested Tiffany.

‘Dinnae worry,’ said a feegle, ‘We’ll find oot, an’ when we do, we’ll give ’im _such_ a kickin’!’

Big Yan waved a foot in the air, like he was looking for an invisible step, and then there was an almighty _crack_ , as if a bolt of lightning hit the exact spot the bear had been standing.

The bear vanished. So did the Feegles.

‘You don’t…’ Tiffany, realising she no longer had any kind of audience, trailed off.

‘We still don’t know where they were going,’ said Frank.

Tiffany sighed. The scar in the turf was the only sign the bear had ever been there.

‘I suppose we’d better go and tell Jeannie,’ she said.

Jeannie had listened to the whole account without saying anything, nodded, and taken the wisp of bear-fur Tiffany had found with great solemnity. Then she’d gone to lie down by her cauldron and dream kelda dreams for a long, long time.

Tiffany herself had gone back down to the various houses and explained, without using the words ‘bear,’ ‘feegle,’ or ‘worlds-spanning war’ that the turf had been damaged by a falling _something_ , and that it was quite safe up there now but the turf needed mending. This was a delicate job, and patches of sod were carefully transplanted over the course of the next week, so that the seam in the earth was drawn together. Within a year or two, a slight depression would be the only sign a bear had ever stood there.

It took nearly a month for the Feegles to come back. Tiffany had gone to see Jeannie every few days, and had felt guiltier each time, but the Kelda had only said she had seen that the boys would be alright. When Tiffany had hesitantly brought up the thing the bear had said about ending destiny, Jeannie had scoffed and said destiny was one thing, but a _weird_ was quite another.

When they did come back, the reason they had been gone so long became clear.

They were dripping with jewels, some of which looked like glittering diamonds made of light without substance, and others like sapphires shaped out of sloshing bits of sea contained in cut air. The exact nature of these were unknown even to the Gonnagle, and the Feegles presented them to Jeannie, who received it all with her customary dignity and hardly chided them at all.

Rob Anybody was with them, which was a relief to Tiffany even if she would only admit it to Frank. Rob, acting out the exciting bits with the assistance of a gaggle of enthusiastic small Feegles holding a sheepskin, told the story of how he had fought the king of the bears for seven days and seven nights in single combat, until the rest of the Feegles had arrived while they were taking a rest and explained that there was an even greater Authority to fight, whereupon he had sworn friendship with the king of the bears for all eternity, or at least until they felt like fighting each other again. He was curiously vague on the subject of the Authority itself, but assured everyone present that a great victory had been achieved in general terms, and that the Gonnagle had composed a song in honour of it. This was so complicated it required both Gonnagle and gonnagle-in training, so Wee Honeymouth Jock played the mousepipes in a way made the inside of the mound reverberate like a beehive under attack while Awf’lly Wee Billy Bigchin recited in wailing tones that made the Feegles pull their hair and sob great fat tears.

At this point, Frank decided it was time to leave, and so Tiffany had pulled herself back up and out of the Feegle mound. She could, and no doubt would, hear the rest later. For once, however, no Feegles followed her home.

Once she was sure she was out of earshot, she looked at her dæmon.

‘That,’ said Frank, ‘was really, really strange.’

[1] The exception which proves the rule in this case being the witch Miss Level, who was born with two bodies, but, being one person, only one dæmon. She’d had three sets of eyes, but witches can be funny like that.

[2] Unless their dæmon is a spider. Even then, one set of two eyes and one set of six is still, strictly speaking, two total.

[3] Some dæmons are rather more peculiar than others. Werewolves’ dæmons are invariably wolves, except during the full moon, when they become elaborately polite humans. It was long thought that trolls, being mineral-based lifeforms, did not have dæmons, but the truth is that troll dæmons are rarely seen, as they are immobile and generally unsociable little oblong blocks of rock prone to singing soprano jingles at inopportune moments.

[4] anymore

**Author's Note:**

> A bit of stupid crack-fic that came about when I realised that 'Will Parry' and 'Rob Anybody' were both names that double as instructions.  
> Please forgive any errors in Feegle-speak, and feel free to come say hi over at ellynneversweet.tumblr.com.


End file.
